Impressions from my year at Microsoft Research

I am not a fan of blogs, but for my own interest I recorded
some impressions from my year at MSR Redmond.

For a reader who doesn't know me, it is important to realize that in many ways I am
the complete opposite of a typical MSR visitor.
I am 57 instead of 27; I own neither cell phone nor laptop;
I like to work on topics no-one else in the world is working on; and I'm a Mac dude.
So, for young people in particular, your experience at MSR would likely be quite
different from mine.

Not an evil empire ....

Though I liked to make "working for the Evil Empire" jokes,
it ain't really so. In the entire year, the only whiff of sulfur was an internal
email encouraging employees to expose interns to major MS technologies -- which is
fine and sensible --
but continuing to say "and actively discourage competitors' tools such as Java,
Eclipse, Matlab, Latex and Google". Harumph.
But after all I could probably find some internal Berkeley emails about
discouraging grad students from going to Stanford .......

... but in fact a great employer ....

MS is in many ways a wonderful and creative employer. Here is one minor instance
that makes a good story. In casual conversation with a stranger, if asked my
occupation, I had two possible answers: Statistics Professor, or working for MS.
Each has a stereotypical response, either "I took a college course in statistics and
couldn't understand it", or a complaint about some piece of MS software. Now
statisticians don't do anything about this situation but MS does. They give
employees 3 cards, to keep in their
wallet, intended for such occasions; one gives a card to the stranger, entitling
them to one free phone call to get technical support on any MS product. Great PR!

... with great employees.

Amazingly, I came across no individual (here I mean from all MS employees, not just
researchers) who was less than competent at their job.
This contrasts with my experience in academia, where 5% of employees should have
been fired years ago. Somehow MS does a
great job of selecting who to hire in the first place.

Of course, as in any large organization the systems may be
less than perfect. The story I tell, to illustrate a complete opposite from academia,
involves moving office (to 3 offices down the hall). In academia there would be no alternative to
physically moving stuff oneself; at MSR we were explicitly forbidden to move stuff ourselves, so
instead of taking 5 minutes to move my few books/folders myself, it occupied a couple of hours
of filling in online forms, having empty boxes delivered,
packing and labeling two boxes, waiting for them to be moved, and
then unpacking.

Non-technical talks kicking off a book tour

As well as many technical talks from different MSR groups,
there are frequent general talks (some addressing the Microsoft campus as a whole,
others aimed at MSR specifically), often by an author of a newly-published book who
is kicking off a book tour. I found these fell into two opposite categories.

1. Would-be best sellers on technology and business/management,
of the genre one finds in airport bookstores.
The most polite descriptive phrase I can devise for these is
"overwhelming hype around some trite catch phrase", as illustrated by the following
example.

ABSTRACT:
The world has changed profoundly, and the old tools that led to success in the world
of "push" won't work anymore. "Pull" helps us to understand the shift we are
experiencing and provides us with a new understanding of the implications of how our
digital world really works. What can we do to thrive in the environment dominated
by the forces of pull. With pioneering research we can show how to access people and
resources when you need them, attract resources you didn't even know existed and
achieve potential with less time and more impact. Few of us are systematic in how
we use the tools available to us, and no institutions are effectively dealing with
the startling changes wrought by new technologies and the attitudes they encourage:
pull will change everything.

OK, so this talk was, like Wagner's music, "not as bad as it sounds" - cute stories, but
without any coherent intellectual theme beyond phrases like "instititional innovation"
and "scalable capability building".

2. Fortunately, there were also genuinely interesting and less
commercially-oriented talks, for instance by

Theory ≠ product

MSR Redmond is made up of
about 40 groups each with about 10 permanent employees,
each group nominally working on some particular topic.
Of course this is the only feasible style for an outfit like MSR --
how else could one structure it?
But to me it suggests a danger of individuals and groups getting absorbed into topics that
fall between "theory" and "product". More precisely,
it's fine if such topics represent a moving wave
propelled by outside developments but not if they stagnate into some inward-looking topic.

Elsewhere I have written a rant
theory is not a product which is aimed as those
of us interested in theory -- do not treat it as product development!
Now there's an obverse meaning: "if you're interested in product development,
don't treat it as theory".
And indeed MSR management has been saying things like
....[let's make] an effort to capitalize on the intellect and abilities we have brought
together in MSR to take on problems that are not just "difficult" but which some
people might call "impossible"
having in mind some actual product, not mere theory.

Did you meet ......... ?

No I didn't meet Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer,
and wouldn't have had anything substantial to say if I had met them.

The general ethos is that the multi-millionaires of early MS
seek to do something substantial, a prime example being Nathan Myhrvold's founding of
Intellectual Ventures. For reasons unconnected with my MSR stay I took a
tour of their
Intellectual ventures lab
which is an amazing place -- where Edison would be working if he were active today.
At an opposite end of some spectrum, for some reason I don't recall we got a briefing
from Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu
on their (progressive) True Patriot project.

Research areas

MSR's own site
outlines the different research fields they cover.
I am hardly revealing secrets by saying that there is lot of interest in
cloud computing and in
NUI (natural user interface),
the latter exemplified by
Project Natal, just launched publically as Xbox Kinect.
Amusingly, the only products in the pipeline that are actually secret within MS
are the games.
I guess they're not worried about employees shooting their mouths off in a bar about
cool features of Windows 8, but as for Halo 4 ...........